The present disclosure relates to the processing of digital or electronic documents.
Many kinds of documents contain repeated instances of similarly formatted text. In classified ads or a telephone directory listings, for example, the different ads or listings will have similar formatting. Because the text in a document or a section of a document can be of similar structure, but the actual content of the text itself may differ, it can difficult to format this text. Such documents can include thousands of similar entries. With features like data merge that exist in many computer program applications, it is easy to create such documents by importing comma-separated files, for example, into a word processing or page layout application template that has appropriate placeholders. In some applications, the placeholders can have formatting that will be applied to the imported data. However, once the text is in the document, it can be difficult to reformat it, except to the extent that the individual items of text have been appropriately marked with styles that can be redefined.
Word processing applications let one create named styles with a set of attributes defined for that style. But these attributes apply to the entire range of text that is specified, and it is difficult to create a single style that by itself can apply certain attributes to certain parts of the text and other attributes to other parts of the text in the selected range.
Similarly, with markup language technologies, such as XML (Extensible Markup Language), styles can be associated with markup tags in structured documents through the use of style sheets written in a style language, such as XSL (Extensible Style Language) and parts of documents may be selected for application of style. However, the association of tags with content is essentially a manual operation, and the selection of parts of documents is based on markup constructs like attributes and elements that are already defined in the document.
In addition to being useful for formatting documents, styles in some word processing and document processing applications can be used to search for and select text based on the styles that are applied to the text. For example, it is commonplace that a user can search for and select contiguous text in a document, regardless of the content of the text, that all has formatting such as “bold and underlined”.